What we are currently seeing with mobile telephones is the fastest and biggest ever change in video gaming. Developments are almost daily as the competitive war between handset providers power the market forwards. There are a number of reason this has come about.
The setting up of Application stores by the handset manufacturers has simplified the market. Before this a game developer or publisher had to deal with hundreds of airtime providers in a highly fragmented market.
The availability of cheap, low power processing. There has been a revolution in just how much processing horsepower phones have. They are now the equivalent of a desk top PC of not so long ago.
The drive to a Swiss Army Penknife, universal pocket device. Still camera, video camera, MP3 player, video player, gaming machine, GPS device, web browser, personal organiser, email terminal, telephone etc etc.
The need for the mobile telephone industry to find new markets now that the voice telephony market is saturated in most countries.
The current best, hottest, latest handset to appear is the Samsung i7500 which uses the Android operating system from Google. It is an amazing device. It’s HVGA AMOLED display makes LCDs look like the old technology they are. The 5 Megapixel camera with flash, autofocus, image stabiliser and geo tagging is good enough to use as a dedicated camera. It would take a massive article to describe everything that this phone is capable of. And Android seems to be emerging to be the best all round system for these devices.
And pretty soon we are going to see the third generation iPhones, with multiple models. Also V3 of the iPhone operating system is imminent. But from rumours that are emerging these are looking like a partial catch up with Android. What is for sure is that the iPhone App Store and iTunes are still massively ahead of the competition. But this could change very quickly with services like Spotify around.
These are all amazing devices that would have been unbelievable just a couple of years ago. As they proliferate and prices come down they will take over from simple phones. This is going to put a lot of processing power in the pockets of hundreds of millions of people, which will be a revolution and not just for gaming.
The rumour mills are running hot after Microsoft put the following in a job advertisement: “And that’s not all, Microsoft is currently building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time with real money on the line (anti-cheating, etc).”
One of the effects of capitalism is that competition drives prices down. Hence globalisation enables us to buy far more stuff with our money than ever before. And where something can be delivered over the interweb the competition is effectively infinite so the price the customer has to pay moves towards zero.
We have seen this most dramatically with journalism. Pre interweb you paid at the newsagent for your newspaper or magazine which in turn paid the journalists. But now news is free, every major newspaper has a website where you can get a better product (because it is more up to date, which matters with news) than the printed one, without having to pay for it. As a result lots of professional journalists no longer have jobs and lots of newspapers have closed down. But as news consumers we have not lost out because we now have citizen’s journalism with blogs and forums supplementing and often replacing the old fashioned news media.
With PC MMOs we have had a similar drive to zero priced games. Maple Story, Habbo, Club Penguin, Runescape and Free Realms all have millions of players. And there are many more such games out there. Obviously the money has to come from somewhere to pay for these games to be written, hosted and supported. This business model works by providing upgrades in the gaming experience for small payments and from advertising. Which with millions of players can add up to a lot of money.
Console gaming works to a completely different business model. They use something called “bait and hook”. You buy the initial brilliant value offering but are then locked into a standard where you have to keep paying a premium price. The huge profit in the high price consumers pay for console games effectively subsidises the cheap price of buying the console in the first place. This business model was made famous by system shaving razors from companies like Gillette and Wilkinson Sword.
These two business models are poles apart, so you would expect them never to come together. However the console manufacturers would still like to find a way of making money from the millions of people who play these MMOs. And the publishers of these games would like the jump in potential revenues that comes from being on additional, widely used platforms.
If ever there was an opportunity to break the World of Warcraft position as the world’s number one played commercial game it will be with these console MMOs.
Human beings evolved as hunter gatherers in the African Savannah (unless you are one of those who think we were created by magic). Video games exist inside the electronics of silicon chips. So enabling human beings to play video games involves some sort of interface that works with hunter gatherer senses.
Early video games used computer keyboards, or dedicated buttons on dedicated machines as input devices. This evolved into the joystick and then the controller. Now, of course, we have gesture interfaces which are even more “natural”.
For output we have the main element of the video screen, which may well be going 3D some time soon. We also have sound, though not as well developed as it could be. And we have force feedback. Obviously the closer we can get to the real world the more realistic games become. This makes them more immersive and helps suspend disbelief. So we get better games, so it is something we want.
Therefore it will come as no surprise that people are thinking of adding smell to our games, thus bringing another of our vital senses into use when game playing. As in many things this is being led by the military. But mass production could very easily see smell technology in everyday home video games.
In a speech earlier this month Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said: “Pay attention to the stuff we’re announcing in the next month on Xbox”. So we have it from the horses mouth that there will be a very major announcement from Microsoft for E3. And 90% it has to be a gesture interface.
“the device is a handheld electronic device.
the device is an input or output device or peripheral.
the device is a controller device.
the settings are associated with a physical configuration of the device.
the settings are associated with a data set employed by the device.”
Just now the movie industry is producing 3D films at an unprecedented rate. Partly because they now can, with digital distribution and digital movie projection. And the TV manufacturing companies are switching to a variety of 3D technologies in their latest models. So there is a groundswell out there and gaming will be a part of it.
The 3D game I saw was using active glasses and was far more effective than the old coloured lens technology. And the results were deeply impressive. It was like going to the theatre having only previously seen the cinema. The whole experience was vastly more immersive. And as this is one of the things we strive for in gaming Blitz would appear to be on a winner with their technology.
I am told that the journalists who have tried this have written it up very positively but then their readers have responded with very negative comments. This is because you really are in no position to form a judgement on the experience till you have tried it yourself.
Screens and user interfaces absolutely everywhere. Technology gets every cheaper which is good because it would cost a fortune to implement this sort of stuff. One thing is for sure, there will be games on all the screens.
